New Fiction: A Reading

Ann Packer is the acclaimed author of two collections of short fiction, Swim Back to Me, and Mendocino and Other Stories, and two bestselling novels, Songs Without Words and The Dive from Clausen's Pier, which received the Kate Chopin Literary Award, among many other honors. Her latest book, The Children's Crusade: A Novel (Scribner), explores the secrets and desires, the remnant wounds and saving graces of one California family, over the course of five decades. The story begins in 1954, long before anyone will call this area Silicon Valley. Struck by a vision of the family he has yet to create, Bill Blair buys the property on a whim, marries a mercurial woman and has four children. Thirty years later, the three oldest Blair children are disrupted by the return of the youngest, whose all-too-familiar troubles force a reckoning with who they are, separately and together, and set off a struggle over the family’s future.

Jill Bialosky is the author of four poetry collections, The Players, The End of Desire, Subterranean, a finalist for the James Laughlin Prize from the Academy of American Poets, and Intruder, a finalist for the 2009 Patterson Poetry Prize. She co-edited Wanting a Child and has written two novels, House Under Snow and The Life Room. Her most recent memoir, History of a Suicide: My Sister’s Unfinished Life was a New York Times bestseller, named one of the ten best works of nonfiction by Entertainment Weekly and a finalist for Books for A Better Life Award and an Ohioana Award. Her latest novel, The Prize (Counterpoint), is a compelling odyssey of a man unhinged by his ideals and an unflinching portrait of a marriage struggling against the corroding tide of time and the proximity to the treacherous fault line between art and money.

Stephanie Kallos is the author of Broken for You, which was selected by Sue Monk Kidd for the Today Show Book Club and was a national bestseller, and Sing Them Home, one of Entertainment Weekly's Ten Best Novels of the year. In her newest novel, Language Arts (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), Kallos spins the stories of a dedicated teacher, his enigmatic son, and a wartime survivor into an affecting tale of love, loss, and handwriting. Charles Marlow teaches his high school English students that language will expand their worlds. But linguistic precision cannot help him connect with his autistic son, or with his ex-wife, who abandoned their shared life years before, or even with his college-bound daughter who has just flown the nest. With the help of an ambitious art student, an Italian-speaking nun, and the memory of a boy in a white suit who inscribed his childhood with both solace and sorrow, Charles may finally be able to rewrite the script of his life. In A starred review, Booklist calls this, “a wondrously beautiful story of love and loss, offering hope in the face of the harshest reality."

Sue Miller is the best-selling author of the novels The Lake Shore Limited, The Senator’s Wife, Lost in the Forest, The World Below, While I Was Gone, The Distinguished Guest, For Love, Family Pictures, and The Good Mother; the story collection Inventing the Abbotts; and the memoir The Story of My Father. The Arsonist (Knopf) is her latest novel. After fifteen years working in East Africa, Frankie Rowley returns to the New Hampshire village where her family has always spent their summers. But the tranquility she’s expecting proves short lived when, on the very night she arrives, a mysterious arsonist begins targeting the homes of other summer residents. As this seemingly idyllic community becomes increasingly on edge, Frankie also has to deal with her father’s declining health—and begins a passionate affair with the editor of a local paper that will yield its own remarkable risks and revelations.